Dean tells Ruth to stop Baker, and when she gives him a questioning look, he waves her out urgently.
A casino? A stolen check?
Dean feels scooped out. His knees wobble and weaken. He places his hand on the wall before him and imagines sliding to the floor. He’s a fool. Someone is trying to make everything he stands for foolish. To make God himself foolish. Someone. Loretta. He had been so sure of her. So sure that he had turned her toward his path. The Lord’s path.
He says pay the check. It’s okay. He does not want anyone else to know anything.
He cannot control the trembling in his hands, and his stomach growls loudly, wrenches against him. He feels as if he might lose control of his bowels. He has to force himself to stand absolutely still, absolutely clenched against this humiliation, his stomach writhing and twisting and a sudden sharp pain that makes Dean feel like an animal, like a filthy beast that will foul itself. When the tremor passes, and he has not fouled himself, everything coheres into a single desire: that this horrific disarray be repaired.
• • •
He tells Baker only what he needs to know: Elko, the Stockmen’s Hotel, the two kids, the Short Creek address, in case it comes to that.
Telling it, Dean seizes with shame and tension. He feels bare before Baker.
Baker, though, seems to have relaxed. To be unspooling, comfortably.
“You want me to do anything to the kid?” he asks.
“Do anything?”
Baker shrugs and smiles.
Dean very much does want Baker to do something like that. He very much does want to do something like that himself. He waits before answering. He wants to say the right thing, and he wants to be the right person, and he wants to have what he wants.
“Maybe not,” he says.
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
Were we magic, America? Were gods lifting us as we flew, carrying us over those buses, those cars, those imitation Conestoga wagons?
That’s not for us to say. If we ever were magic, we’re not now, now that we’re dead. It’s not what we expected here, nothing like anyone said it would be, but at least it goes on, boring as it is, awful as it is. We live in a plain room and eat in a cafeteria and there is nothing to do here but that — eat and remember, eat and remember.
Death used to be so important to us. Every time we put on that jumpsuit, the red, white, and blue, every time we sat at the bottom of the ramp before a jump, twisting the throttle, feeling the foam seat snug between our legs, insides rattling, breath too quick, remembering the crashes, the black fury of them, the feeling of our spine giving way and the instant knowledge that we’re holding hands with death in a way that none of those people in the grandstands can ever know, not even if they go to war, not even if they’re murdered at gunpoint, the moment so specific to us that it can’t even exist in the imagination of anybody else.
Death was our partner. Our friend. For a while, anyway. Now it’s turned on us, too.
We might have shown up anywhere in the good years. Any little shithole bar. Any Podunk store or restaurant. Anywhere we went became a temple, and we were a god, and the worship was love, the purest sweetest love, and it was as all things were then — the more we were granted, the more we hungered. The more we starved. Until there was nothing that could ever feed us.
You didn’t know us, not really, but, America, we dwelled in every part of you. We lived in Butte and Las Vegas. Spokane and Reno. Boise and Grand Rapids and Tuscaloosa and Elmira. We were everywhere. Sometimes we were in a particular place and couldn’t be in other places where we were needed. Where the country had an ebb in courage or confidence, and needed its daredevil. We did the best we could. Don’t say we didn’t.
Years and years and years passed. Just gone. When we went to Spokane, people would ask about the time we punched a cop in the Davenport Hotel. Down in Reno, some asshole would come up and remind us about the time we were thrown out of the Sands for taking out our dick at the craps table. They sold toys in our image, wrote comic books about us — showed us flying down from the sky to disrupt robberies and capture evildoers. They made us forever twenty-five years old, throbbing with muscle.
By the end, though, it got fucking weird, America. On the Internet, the computer tubes and such, there are fan sites — evelrocks.com, evelsavestheuniverse.com — where people write stories about us. Stories about “us.” Craziest shit. Superhero fantasies. We fly around the world and fire amazing weapons from the air. We hold off nuclear annihilation. We turn back floods and tsunamis, stabilize the earth during quakes, send doomsday bombs spinning into space. And then there are the other stories. The villain tales. In these we are a criminal and worse. We stick up banks and fly through the shadows of the night. We run tables and women in inner cities. We are killed, explosively, spectacularly, by other superheroes — the X-Men, Spider-Man, Captain America.
The craziest shit got crazier. That is just basic American gravity, the primary force of the whole damn country, crazy pulled toward crazier. One of the Web sites had a link called “Evel Erotica.” Seriously. The world is full of more stupid shit than anyone could ever guess, and every bit of it comes from other people. Other people. You spend your whole life trying to do something in relation to them — impress them, get their love and attention — and then it somehow all gets turned into stories, then lies, and then something like this:
Cherry leaned forward and Evel drove into her from behind. “You’re in for the ride of your life,” the handsome daredevil exclaimed, thrusting while he ran the bike up the ramp and off into the air, fucking and flying, until the bike landed with a violent lurch and they crashed and came, breaking their bones, spilling their blood…
It is a fucked-up world, America. Even the love is all wrong.
PIONEER DAY
July 24, 1958 SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
It is Pioneer Day, and almost raining, thick clouds ready to burst during the morning parade and services. Everyone is ready for rain. Dust rises with every step. The wheat and barley wilt. But everyone prays for the storm to hold off, just through tonight, through the dance. Everyone tries to read the sky as a signal from the Lord, and Ruth is doing that, too, Ruth is watching the sky and hoping it will do as she asks, that it will open up and pour down upon them so there will be no dancing. She is hoping this even as she knows it will not happen, that even if it rains there will be dancing, in the wardhouse or in the school, and that she will be there for the dancing, and that Brother Billy will be there for the dancing, and that Brother Billy will be there to dance with her, and that he will know what that means, and she will know what that means, and everyone around them — right down to the children — will know what it means, too.
• • •
In the afternoon, the brothers and sisters pick corn for the dinner. The clouds move off and return but nothing falls. Ruth stays in the rows as long as she can, breathing dust and corn silk, relishing the close, shady tunnels, hoping not to see Brother Billy or her parents. She snaps the ears downward and tucks them into a burlap sack held by her sisters, Alma and Sarah. They are singing a song together, under their breath, the way they do, as though their hushed singing were a secret. “‘Father, I will rev’rent be / And in thy house walk quietly.’” They are always quiet, these two, always together, and usually near Ruth, ever since the days when it was unclear if they would ever return home, the days they spent in the house of the man and woman whose name Ruth cannot remember — though it is more true to say that Ruth will not allow herself to remember the name. They all came back with different experiences. Ruth’s father spent four days in jail. Her mother and aunts had spent the days here with no word about their children. “‘Listen to the words I hear, / For in thy house I feel thee near.’” And the children had all gone to different families, to Gentiles and apostate Mormons in Hurricane and Cedar City and St. George, each to a different home that was not home. Ruth and Sarah and Alma had spent the quiet days in the home of the family in Hurricane with the television and the fancy plates and the gentle whispering. That had been their exile. Ruth knew to feel fortunate, because some children did not return, children who were kept away by the Federal Men, kept in other families, and their parents live on in Short Creek, moving among them like ghosts. “‘May my thoughts more perfect be, / That I may speak more rev’rently.’”